Apple’s ‘Swift’ Programming Language Is Taking The Leap From Apps To Data Centers

About eighteen months ago, the world was introduced to Swift, the new Apple-created programming language for App building. Swift was meant to make Apps easier for programmers to build, and it was well received. Big names in the technology world like LinkedIn, Vine, and Yahoo have embraced Swift as their App coding language of choice. Tiobe Index even ranked Swift in the top 15 of the Internet’s most popular languages.

A new challenge

But now that Swift has taken the App building community by storm, it’s looking for a new challenge. Now Swift is ready to take on the data centers that run applications and sites across the web. Sean Stephens announced his intention to further the reach of his pet programming language earlier this week when PerfectlySoft (Stephens’ new company) launched a version of Swift called “Perfect,” that runs on the back-end servers that power Swift built applications.

Easier App Development

Anyone who’s ever tried their hand at being the mythical “full-stack developer” can tell you that learning one language to control both the front- and back-end of App and website development would make their job infinitely easier. And that’s exactly the solution that Stephens’ wants to provide with Perfect. Currently, Perfect only runs on the OS X operating system, and while popular with the individual consumer market, OS X is far from the system of choice for most servers.

Growth and Development

Stephens’ hope seems to be that once they open source Swift, it will grow to compete with the other household coding languages like Objective-C, Javascript, and Python. PerfectlySoft has streamlined Swift with the tools required to deploy and run the language on servers. However, it won’t fully take off until Apple open sources its new language and allows the coding community to pick through Swift’s underpinnings.

The idea of using the same language for client and server is not a new one. Node.js is a tool that allows developers to build server software in Javascript – a language originally used to build website applications. Perfect seems to have the potential to overshadow tools like Node.js as it grows – and as Apple’s influence over server-side data centers grows with it.

Coders are increasingly using and demanding leaner, more efficient languages to help them build Apps that can handle massive amounts of traffic. GoogleGo, Rust, and Erlang are all current darlings of the tech crowd. Swift is a new language, and Perfect has barely left the nursery, but this is the playground it wants to rule.

Opinions of Swift

Adam Jacob, Chief of Technology Officer at Chef – a data center and software design and deployment company – says, “Swift feels similar to Rust. They give you a pretty expressive foundation that complies to pretty low-level code.” What that translates to in layman’s terms is speed. Expressive, low-level code makes building apps easier while allowing the software to operate on a level with the hardware, which equals high-speed operation.